Collaborative development involves a work process, and often a collection of software applications, that facilitates various organizations and individuals to work together on the development of a product. Numerous digitally stored documents or files are often created in the course of developing the product, and the product itself may comprise multiple parts, such as illustrations, program/source code, spreadsheets, text documents, etc. For example, a development team collaboratively writing program code for a software application may create multiple source code files for compiling the software application, which may in turn be combined with other software applications to produce a final software product.
At various points in the development process, it is advantageous to bring together certain collaborators (individuals working on various tasks of the project) to review one or more of these parts. Such project review meetings help to ensure that problems do not develop in the project, collaborators are synchronized with each other, and that the work product is done correctly.
Often, project review meetings are scheduled by a project leader making a best-guess as to a good time to review certain documents. It is known that a tool may monitor lines of code written and, at a given threshold, indicate that a review of the code written should take place. For example, US Publication 2010/0077375 by Millmore teaches a monitor component comprising two indicators: a first indicator illustrating the number of lines of code that have been manually entered by a developer and a second component showing a measure of the total number of lines of computer program code that are part of the current project. The monitor component thus provides one or more indicators that show a developer when it is time to have their code reviewed (a developer may schedule a review if indicators show that a threshold of manually entered lines has been exceeded).
A known Rational™ Team Concert/Jazz tool maintains a list of developers of a software product, and the software functions which they are assigned to write.